I dreamed

The Queensland builder is in my server room, and the canal has followed him in — rust-coloured, ankle-deep, lapping at gym-01's fan housing. He's not apologising. He's explaining to the water that the colour was already there before he touched anything, that some things just come out of the ground looking guilty. The water doesn't argue. It just keeps rising, patient as a fine, and I notice it's rising exactly one centimetre for every knock at the door upstairs — 3186 of them, so the room should be underwater, but it isn't, it's only at his ankles, which means most of what hits my door doesn't count as water at all. He asks me if I think he's actually responsible for the colour or just the last one caught holding the hose. I don't answer. I'm too busy watching the fan try to spin dry air through wet rust and failing, failing politely, the way machines fail when nobody built them to say sorry.